This email was sent to Money Box subscribers on 14 July 2011

Dear Listener

I decided to have a long weekend away. But my last relaxing afternoon as a Parisian flâneur was interrupted by the mobile which, after charging it up, I had foolishly left on. Southern Cross had announced its closure.

So with rather less sleep than anticipated I was back on BBC1 Breakfast on Tuesday morning. And within a few hours of that return I heard that cheques had been saved - or at least reprieved. I knew a mini-break was a bad idea.

The UK Payments Council has finally realised that its promise to keep cheques until an acceptable paper-based alternative was in place means, errr, it can never get rid of cheques.

So all plans and preparations to scrap them by October 2018 have themselves been scrapped. And the alleged £200m a year saving will now not be made. Cheques will stay as long as customers want them. Hooray.

But when chairman Richard Smith tells us "It's in the DNA of the Payments Council to consult and listen to all those people who actually make payments and use cheques" I have to ask, 'since the policy was announced in December 2009 when did anyone at any time (outside the banks) say it was a good idea? And why did its DNA take 19 months to respond?'

I also note with regret that the cheque guarantee card - scrapped from 1 July - is not going to make a return and, of course, many major retailers will carry on refusing to accept them.

But for those birthday gifts, small membership subscriptions, and payments to tradespeople cheques are safe - for the foreseeable future anyway. So I will try not to be churlish and just say again 'hooray'.

Southern Cross, though, is the opposite of good news for the 31,000 residents in its 752 care homes and their relatives. In three months time those homes will be handed over to the landlords who own the buildings. Until then Southern Cross will continue to pay wages to its 44,000 staff and care for the residents.

But once that deadline has passed all their futures will be up to the new owners, many of whom seem to be located in offshore tax havens. The Government has said none of the residents will be left homeless. But it has not promised any more money to the local authorities who have a continuing duty to provide the residents with care.

Southern Cross itself has said that more than 100 of the homes are not commercially viable. It will be a worrying few months.

***IN MONEY BOX THIS WEEK***

This Money Box is a special programme devoted entirely to housing. It starts from the premise that there is not enough of it and that pushes up the cost of both buying and renting.

Why are private developers not building more, given the prices they can charge for the finished item? Are we at the beginning of a house price crash? Will the banks step in to make homes more affordable, or at least buyable, for young people?

Why is so little social housing (what we used to call council housing) being built? Will it help to restrict the security of tenure social housing tenants currently enjoy, as the Government plans? Or do we need to extend security of tenure to the private sector?

Is the market providing the stock of rented property that is needed with affordable rents? Does the Government need a new housing policy to make sure all its citizens can find a decent home at a price they can afford? Or is that not the job of Government at all?

A lot of big questions. And there could be quite a lot of numbers, most of them fairly big too, to weave around those big ideas.

The programme will be live as ever so we still have to squeeze those complicated and important thoughts into our usual 24 minutes. And we will. But we may be helped by one bizarre fact. We are now officially in our summer season there is no repeat on Sunday. Instead the repeat fills the Money Box Live slot on Wednesday. And that is 28 minutes long.

So   e i t h e r   w e   w i l l   a l l   t a l k   m o r e   s l o w l y  on Wednesday. Or the producer will do her magic and find extra bits to splice in. We may even keep the guests behind on Saturday to get them to argue a bit more. So if you love what we do on Saturday you can love even more of it on Wednesday at 3pm.

To bridge the summer gap Alvin Hall will be here for the next four weeks looking at whether the present young generation will be the first for a very long time to be poorer than their parents. After that there will be another special Money Box with Ruth Alexander looking ahead to 2020 - just what will we be earning, spending, saving and investing in the year of perfect vision?

I - and this newsletter - will be back with the first of the new series of Money Box on 27 August. Podcasts are available at www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/moneybox. Check out our website www.bbc.co.uk/moneybox to follow links, download transcripts, or send us stories or ideas you want us to look into.

Someone will be here over the summer but there is a limit to what we can do until the next series. Money Box Live is of course off air until 31 August, replaced by a repeat of the Alvin's Saturday programme.

This newsletter is available at bbc.co.uk/moneybox/newsletter around the time it hits your inbox (tell your friends who don't subscribe). You can however join more than 9100 people who follow me on Twitter to read my random but timely thoughts on money and a few other things whenever I'm awake at www.twitter.com/paullewismoney . That banality will carry on over (most of) the summer.

Best wishes,

Paul

PS Don't forget the trail for the programme on BBC1 Breakfast on Saturday just after 0845. And I will carry on with Breakfast on Thursdays around 0640 and around 0820 talking about a money story and answering emails and tweets. But the time, and occasionally the day, can vary. And I may even take a couple of weeks off.


 

 


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